Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am not going to draw conclusions about the proposals. The figure that Eir and the Department have in common is 335, so there are 35,000 additional premises served by Eir. At the same time, there is a considerable number of premises which the Department has identified, in addition to the 84,000 that were taken out before, where although there was an indication that commercial service would be delivered, it does not now seem that it will be delivered.

On the service which is wireless and based on 5G technology, the point has to be made that both the Commission for Communications Regulation, ComReg, and the Department's experts have always argued - indeed, in common with much of the industry - that 5G networks and 4G networks are complementary technology to fibre roll-out and are not a replacement. There are a number of reasons for that. One is that the wireless technology is line-of-sight, which has restrictions on its capacity. To overcome those restrictions, one would need to build a great number of masts. The evaluation by ComReg indicated that to build the number of masts on the scale needed would cost in the region of €1.8 billion. The second reason is that it is shared or, I think the word is "contested", which means that when a service is delivered, the more people who come on board for the service means that it becomes diluted, which is unlike fibre to the home.

There are issues here that clearly the Department has to tease out with the two companies. It would be untrue for the Deputy to assume that the intervention area has been reduced to whatever the number he quoted as result of these decisions. Clearly, investment in this area is very welcome. It brings forward the delivery of service but we will listen closely to the companies before we give an indication and I will inform the Deputy.

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